“There is only one difference between a madman and me. The madman thinks he is
sane, I know I am mad.” Salvador Dalí
Salvador Dalí’s paintings are among the most easily recognisable in the world.
Oozing pocket watches, bleak expansive landscapes, erotic and grotesque nudes,
melting body parts supported by precariously placed crutches, spindly legged
elephants that seem certain to topple. All are among the many classic components
that so often frequent Dalí’s hallucinatory dreamscapes and serve to distinguish him
as both a preeminent painter and a complete weirdo.
The artist’s Surrealist imagery was loaded with symbolism, some of it straight from
Freud, and some of it from Dalí’s own imagination. The symbolism was often
sexually significant, in which he gave inanimate objects and animals symbolic.
meanings relating to for example, rhinoceros horns a symbol of chastity and the
Virgin Mary, and that eggs represented purity, perfection, intrauterine life and rebirth.
“Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles
limiting our vision.” Salvador Dalí
Dalí, who lived from 1904 to 1989, was a member of the Surrealist movement. And
like many of the Surrealists, he dabbled in other artistic genres apart from painting
and writing. There’s no question that Dalí completely captured people’s attention, by
his often off-the-wall behaviour.
His strange artistic outpourings and shockingly outlandish claims have at different
times been called scandalous, brilliant, bizarre, appalling, inspired, disgusting and
flamboyant, just to name a few.Dalí designed jewellery, magazine covers, costumes,
advertisements and furniture. He created sculptures, lithographs, installation art–
and in everything, he was, above all, experimental.
“The secret of my influence has always been that it remained secret.” Salvador Dalí
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